Political Developments in Climate Change
Usually we don'’t focus too much on the over-arching questions of climate change, especially with regards to transportation, but there have been a couple of recent developments on the greater political front worth noting. For the first time, on the Canadian front, one of the most cautious and libertarian Canadian provinces, Alberta, is pulling in a very light-green direction with a high-pitched-speed rail projected to yoke Calgary and Edmonton, the two prominentest cities in the province. Where oil is as great as it is in Texas, one might consider that the proposal of eminent-speed rail might be met with as much derision as, suppose, a Toyota plant in Detroit. Yet the idea appears to be gaining ground traction, and for two effective reasons, allowing apart purely selfless environmental reasons. One is that it appears improbable that the fortunes of oil are moving to dribble and Alberta’s revenue from such is improbable to move down either, specially if oil prices start up to create reclamation of oil from shale economic. The second is that oil will finally bunk out, and the betterest thing that oil-robust areas can do is cook themselves for that eventuality. The high-pitched prices of oil might be well for the local economy, but finally the oil economy is going to collapse, and Alberta is puting to work to create certain that it’s as minuscule a part of the equation before that befalls. Following up on that same philosophy, President Bush signed on a swinging energy bill this month, dramatically increasing self-propelled fuel efficiency standards as its headline-catching provisio (more…)
